


epsilon canis majoris

by sesquidpedalian



Series: Dr. Stone Week 2020 [6]
Category: Dr. STONE (Anime)
Genre: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Friendship, Gen, Literal Sleeping Together, Night Terrors, Pillow Fights, Platonic Cuddling, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, general silliness, ridiculous self-indulgent tooth-rotting fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-03
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:42:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25055632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sesquidpedalian/pseuds/sesquidpedalian
Summary: Chrome blinks slowly at his hands. He’s fine. He’s in the science hut. The faint scent of metal and earth, constant and steadying. The warmth from every point of contact between him and Senku. The sound of breathing. His, right? His breathing?For Dr. Stone Week Day Six:  Modernization - Stars, Nightmares, “Let’s be honest, this isn’t the worst thing you’ve caught me doing.”
Relationships: Chrome & Ishigami Senkuu, Ishigami Senkuu & Chrome & Asagiri Gen & Kohaku
Series: Dr. Stone Week 2020 [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2078955
Comments: 5
Kudos: 36
Collections: Dr. Stone Week 2020





	epsilon canis majoris

**Author's Note:**

> listen quarantine's been getting to me too okay, just let them be soft with each other
> 
> epsilon canis majoris is a binary star, and it's the second brightest object in the constellation canis major!

Chrome wakes up in silence. This is odd, because he wants to scream. 

_Hissing air, and a whirling spear, and fire, a home that used to be his on_ fire _._

He sits up, runs a hand through his hair, yanking without thinking. 

_Dark and dark and dark_.

He blinks hard and forces himself to breathe slowly. Something groans and shifts, and it sounds like grit and howling, like an _avalanche_.

_The sound of crumbling rock, a cut-off shout and flickering lamp light._

The door to his hut creaks open, and light seeps in. His eyes adapt slowly to the dark, until he can vaguely see the silhouettes of jars of rocks and shelves of collected knicknacks, and now he takes a deep breath because he knows where he is and it’s safe to breathe here.

_Glittering blue beauty, ready to swallow him whole._

“Chrome.”

Senku and Gen’s pale faces, strange like distorted mirrors of each other, peer at him from the door. He’s not sure which one of them spoke. There is a blanket wrapped around them that seems to melt their sleep-ruffled hair and two curious heads into a single rumpled body. A monster is staring at him from outside his door.

The urge to scream does not dissipate.

“Chrome,” one of the pale, pale faces says again, and this time Chrome recognizes the rasp of Senku’s voice whispering in the night-time air. Senku scrambles to his feet, sheds the blanket he’s sharing with Gen. “Do you know where you are?”

His eyes are steady, focused, as he ducks inside, kneels by Chrome’s bedroll like he was trained for this and nothing else.

“Yeah,” Chrome says. “The science hut. My hut. I know. I’m not…” What isn’t he?

In the long silence that follows, Senku’s expression doesn’t falter once. 

“You’re not what?” he prompts, searingly gentle.

“I’m not—” Chrome starts without thinking. He hadn’t known Senku could speak so softly. It guides him along like a fishing hook under his ribs. “I’m fine,” he says instead. 

He flinches when Senku bumps their shoulders together.

Chrome blinks slowly at his hands. He’s fine. He’s in the science hut. The faint scent of metal and earth, constant and steadying. The warmth from every point of contact between him and Senku. The sound of breathing. His, right? His breathing?

There is shuffling and whispering happening somewhere on the periphery of Chrome’s awareness. All he knows is the warmth goes away, but that’s fine, he’s a scientist, he doesn’t need warmth, just needs to know where he is and that’s it. The world sprawls at his feet and tomorrow will rise with the golden sun to light his path. He doesn’t need companions for that. 

He focuses on the floor. The floor is made of wood, not acid, not crumbling rock, not ocean or fire or thorns. Right?

“Smell this.” Senku shoves the physical manifestation of _bad-smelling_ in Chrome’s face.

Chrome yelps, falls back. “What the _hell_ , Senku?” he gasps between coughs. The floor of the hut is hard underneath him, and the door is wide open and the jars and the rocks and the shelves are all there, exactly where his rapidly-adjusting eyes say they should be.

“It woke you up, didn’t it?” Senku looks unbearably smug as he puts the awful-smelling thing away. “Ammonia has a number of extremely useful applications.”

“Ugh,” Chrome mutters.

“Yeah,” Senku says with a shrug. He sits back down beside Chrome, having miracled a blanket out of nowhere, or possibly from the other side of the room. Senku wraps it around his and Chrome’s shoulders.

“Wait. Where’d Gen go? And what were you guys doing up anyway?”

“And at last he returns from dream land,” Senku intones sarcastically. “I sent Gen out on a mission. We were just talking. Couldn’t sleep.” He offers nothing else.

Chrome feels kind of funny. Restless, floating, free-falling. The silence grows endless. Painful, but not in a way that has anything to do with his physical body. He presses himself closer against Senku’s side, and Senku elbows him.

“You’re being awfully quiet. Whatever that was spooked you pretty badly, huh?” Senku’s voice turns teasing. “Did poor wittle Chrome have a scary dream?”

Chrome jerks away and tries to ignore how it feels like physically ripping the warmth out of himself. “Shut up! I’m fine. You’re the one crawling into my bed in the middle of the night, weirdo!”

Senku frowns, watching. Chrome’s face feels hot. A callused hand presses itself to Chrome’s forehead, a bit rough as it pushes the hair off his face, and Chrome would shy away from that too, except it feels like settling into a soft bed after a day’s hard labour, and there is something contrite shining in Senku’s eyes. “Sorry. Only joking. You’re okay.”

“I don’t need _you_ to tell me that,” Chrome grouches, still shaky down to his bones. “What are you, my mom?”

“Let’s sit outside. Gen will be back in a minute.” 

Once they’re situated on the ledge outside the door, the warmth of body heat not his own returns. This time, Senku says nothing, lets Chrome settle against him, breathing steadily until Chrome’s breathing slows to match. The cool night air fills his lungs.

For the sake of something to say, Chrome points at a random star in the sky and says, “Is there a story behind that one?”

Senku blinks up at it. “None that I know of.”

“Tell me about the moons again.” Chrome’s being childish, he knows, seeking comfort in old stories, but Senku’s voice, when he talks all soft like that, is easy to get lost in.

“Again?”

“Jupiter’s moons. The ones that Galileo guy saw.”

“All right.” Senku rolls his shoulders, adjusts the blanket minutely. “Way back in 1609, an guy named Galileo Galilei heard about a new invention from the Netherlands. A spyglass, designed to let you see things that were very far away. He was fascinated, and after figuring out the secret to building his very own, he worked at constantly improving them, until they were more powerful than any that others had made. He pointed his spyglasses at the sky, and found, orbiting around the planet Jupiter, four moons.”

“Io, Europa, Ganymede, and...uh...”

“Callisto,” Senku supplies.

“Right.” Chrome shakes his head. “The name just slipped my mind for a second.” 

“Mhm.”

Twin shadows flit across the clearing toward them, and Chrome recoils violently enough to dislodge the blanket. Senku rearranges it around them without comment. 

“Hey, mentalist,” he calls down.

Gen smiles up at them through the darkness. Beside him stands Kohaku, her hair a blonde sleep-rumpled mess.

“This better be worth getting up in the middle of the night,” she says blearily, probably soft only by virtue of the fact that she was asleep five minutes ago and no part of her, least of all her voice, is entirely awake. “Chrome?”

He has the sudden and inexplicable urge to hide, every eye on him. Gods this is _embarrassing_ —

But in a blink, Kohaku is up the ladder and pulling them inside to help arrange the blankets into something comfortable enough for all four of them, and he forgets his embarrassment in favour of grumbling at Kohaku to put that over _there_ , no, not like _that_ , here let me do it, and laughing when Senku trips over an errant basket and crashes face-first to the floor. 

Gen flops over onto the mess with a pillow and a quiet cheer, and Senku, sprawled out on the giant makeshift bed they’ve made, doesn’t move at all, not even when Chrome shuffles into him to make room for Kohaku (and for absolutely no other reason because he’s a _scientist_ and scientists don’t need human warmth and gentle voices and the terrifying, all-consuming sensation of a rough-palmed hand curling around their own and squeezing once before letting go).

“You okay?” Kohaku asks, throwing an arm across his shoulders and tugging him close.

“Yeah, it was nothing. What are you even doing here?”

Kohaku shrugs with one shoulder. “Gen came and found me. Said something was up with you.”

“Well I’m fine now,” Chrome says. “Must’ve been a bad dream. I don’t really remember it.”

“Want a pillow?” Senku asks, shoving one in Chrome’s face. This is promptly followed by a muffled yelp as Senku drops the pillow into Chrome’s lap and twists around to fend off Gen, who’s smothering him with another one.

“What in the gods’ names are you guys doing,” Kohaku says. She reaches out and yanks the weapon of mass destruction, soft and fluffy, out of Gen’s hands.

“Aw, hey!” Senku and Gen cry in unison, and then they blink at each other and fall into helpless laughter. Chrome can’t help his smile.

“It’s official. They’ve lost it.” Kohaku nods solemnly. “I always knew this day would come.”

“It’s called a pillow fight,” Senku gasps as if that’s any kind of answer, rolling over to pin Gen down. “I’m gonna kill you, mentalist.”

Kohaku exchanges a look with Chrome. “Fifteen seconds.”

Chrome snorts. “No way. You know what Senku’s stamina is like. They’ll be lucky to get to ten.”

After eleven seconds of intense play-wrestling, all their hard work assembling the blankets has been undone. Senku and Gen do not look remotely apologetic as they pull themselves upright and try to repair the damage.

Eventually: “You were wrong.”

“So were you! It was closer to ten than fifteen, therefore, I win.” Chrome sticks his tongue out at Kohaku.

She does not dignify this with a verbal response, just shoots the other two a reprimanding look. They’ve collapsed on each other, panting. “I can’t believe I thought I was going to like you, Senku.”

Senku’s eyes glimmer with mischief and reflected moonlight. “You don’t need to like me to be useful to the Kingdom of Science. And anyway, you like me a lot. Why else would you have helped me for so long?”

Gen looks up, expression shadowy and half-lidded in the dark. “This is hardly the worst thing you’ve seen us doing,” he says, grinning like a cat spirit.

Kohaku rolls her eyes, already settling down to sleep. She loops an arm around Chrome’s waist. 

“Um…”

“Come on, lie down. Or do you plan on sleeping sitting up?”

And okay, it’s not like the two of them are unfamiliar with curling up in a pile when one or both can’t sleep but it seems _weird_ to do it while Senku and Gen are right! there! watching!

Then there are hands on his shoulders, pushing him down. He struggles briefly before recognizing Gen’s faint smile. “You should listen to Kohaku, dear. Who knows what she might do to you if you don’t obey her?”

“I’m not a _monster_ ,” Kohaku grumbles into Chrome’s side, eyes closed. 

Senku gets up to shut the door. When he returns, he sits on the side of Chrome not occupied by a mostly-asleep-by-now Kohaku, closer than is probably necessary.

The warmth is everywhere now and Chrome really really doesn’t know what to do with all this, with the remaining traces of worry still on everyone’s faces, with the gentle, fine-boned fingers combing through his hair, with the barely-there whispers of a conversation happening somewhere behind him and to his left. He lies down, but what for? It’s one measly nightmare; what did he do to warrant all this?

“Oh, you don’t know?” Senku asks.

“Wait, did I say that out loud—”

“You keep waking up screaming, dear Chrome,” Gen murmurs, leaning down over Chrome’s head. “It was a surprise when you _didn’t_ this time around.” The hands in Chrome’s hair, no longer content with simply combing, start massaging at his scalp. Chrome lets his eyes close.

“Night terrors. Usually a product of stress or sleep deprivation, if I recall correctly. So relax. You’re fine.” Cool fingers press themselves to the inside of Chrome’s wrist. “What’s been keeping you up anyway?”

“No talking, just sleep,” Kohaku orders, face pressed into the blankets somewhere by Chrome’s shoulder.

“Okay, yeah, fine,” Senku says. “We can talk about it in the morning.” It sounds like a promise.

Someone leans in close enough that Chrome can feel their breath on his ear. “Get some rest, dear Chrome. We’re not going anywhere.”


End file.
